Where are the movie
queues of yester-year? Are the hearts and minds of film fans being taken over
by alien machines? Is it true that strange black monoliths called VCRs are
spreading their spores across the world?

Panic time is never a
good reason for rational thinking. And since the movie world has been
panicking ever since the fifties, when the graph of filmgoing
took a dip that has continued ever since, it's no wonder that good sense has
been in short supply for over 30 years. Back then every­one thought that
television was the villain, and Hollywood's boldest brains countered the
small-screen threat with a bounty of ever wider screens and ever more Brob­dingnagian showmanship: Cinemascope, Cinerama, Circlorama, 3D & Co.

But this
going-for-broke giantism didn't check the slide.
Three decades later we can reflect that maybe TV wasn't the main culprit
after all. And today's newly nomi­nated enemies of cinema – cable, video,
satellite – may not be the main reason for emptying movie houses in the
eighties.

Britain is the most
interesting test coun­try in the world today, since it's here that
videocassette recorders have invaded homes to a greater degree than in any
other Western industrialized country. There are 8 to 9 million VCRs in
circulation in the U.K., representing 38 percent of the TV owning population.
(Compare the States, whose 20 million VCRs in use rep­resent 20 percent of TV
owning homes.) Britain has been video-mad for years now, and there are
probably two main reasons. 1. British TV with its high program-qual­ity
spread across four channels (as opposed to the U.S.A.'s abysmal program
quality spread across dozens) encourages "time-switching;' the habit of
recording a program you want to see that's on when you're out or when you're
watching another channel. 2. The rental-VCR busi­ness that has gown up in
Britain (and hasn't in the States) means users don't have to lay out a
walloping three-figure sum to buy the machinery; they can pay about £20 a
month. This guarantees provision not just of the machinery but also of ser­vice
and maintenance. It also allows users to swap one machine for another if they
want to change size, sophistication, or for­mat. They can exchange the Betamax VCR, with its shrinking share of the mar­ket, for
the more popular VHS.

Pundits with a
tendency to put two and two together and assume, overtrustingly,
that they equal four argue that the British video boom must be a major reason
for the continuing slump at the British box office. It's a tempting
conclusion, as one plum­meting graph line (cinema attendance) coincides with
another soaring one (video usage). But David Docherty of the Broad­casting
Research Unit,* who is currently compiling a statistical survey, "The
Enter­tainment Film in British Life," thinks it's a shaky half-truth at
best-like the half-truth that it was television that first sent cinema
audiences nosediving back in the 1950s.

DOCHERTY: The high
point of filmgo­ing in Britain was in 1946, when
1.63 billion tickets were bought at the cinema. After that, just as in the
United States, attendance started to fall. And it fell stead­ily for ten
years before TV even came onto the scene as a mass-circulation competi­tor.
In fact, the decline slowed temporarily when commercial television was
intro­duced. So it's quite false to link the declin­ing habit of filmgoing with the rise of TV In Britain it has had much
more to do with population movement. After the war, cine­mas stayed in
decaying town centers when the C2 unskilled working class, who were always
the biggest audience, moved out. The cinemas didn't follow them into the
suburbs, as they did in America. And even most new towns were built without
cine­mas. So it's clear that, with or without television, filmgoing
would have peaked in the mid-forties. Indeed, we find there's a more or less
smooth statistical rise and fall on either side of 1946 – with 907 million
attendances in 1935, eleven years before, and 915 million in 1957, eleven
years later.

KENNEDY: But last year
movie atten­dance hit an all-time low of 53 million, which means that since
the high point of 1946 attendances have fallen by 97 per­cent. Television may
not be the main fac­tor, but it's surely an important one. In this decade
hasn't video helped the slump?

DOCHERTY: That would
be true if there were an accelerated decline in filmgoing
since 1980, when home video first became a factor. But what we find is that
the downward trend of the fifties, sixties, and seventies continues steadily
into the eighties at least up until this year. And we've also found that VCR
owners are not less frequent filmgoers than other sec­tions of the
population. The main video owners are in the 25-35 age range, who as a group
are more frequent cinemagoers than the 45-plus age group. Among the
45-and-overs there is less interest in both cinema and video, and a higher
satisfac­tion with network TV. Among film enthu­siasts we've also found –
with a movie like ET,for
instance – that viewing the movie on video first, in a pirated version,
doesn't stop them going to see it in a cinema.

KENNEDY: Nonetheless,
as of 1985, the video market is on the up and up and the cinema has
plummeted.

DOCHERTY: Well, in
fact, it's likely that film audiences will rise from 53 mil­lion to just over
60 million. That's mainly thanks to U.S. blockbusters like Grem­lins, Ghostbusters,and Beverly
Hills Cop. But there's a good chance that the cinemas could now hold at
60 million or over and that we're already past the worst. There's also
evidence that the VCR market is approaching saturation point. In 1984 sales
of VCRs in Britain, for instance, were 1.5 million, which is down from 2.2
mil­lion in 1983, and 1985 has slowed still further. So both markets,
video and cin­ema, may now be leveling off. The most bullish video market in
fact is the United States, where the prediction is that by 1990 the 20
million VCR owners will have risen to 68 million – 75 percent of the
TV-owning population.

There are signs, too,
that the video software boom is leveling off in Brit­ain. The revenue from
prerecorded tapes in 1984 was £270 million (£235 million rented, £35 million
sold), a 35 percent increase over 1983's £200 million (£190 million rented,
£10 million sold). But pre­dictions for 1985 suggest £300 million rev­enue,
merely an 11-percent upswing with the "sold" figure static at £35
million.

In the fight to keep a
slice of the market, shops and rental companies offering pre­recorded tapes
in Britain wage a furious price war, and in the last year or two they have
cut their profit margins to the bone, with rentals as low as £1 for a night
or £2 for a weekend. The cost-cutting seems the only way for a night tape
market to com­pete with the habit in many households of copying feature films
straight off the networks. But it still hasn't stopped the number of specialist homevid
dealers in Brit­ain sliding from 8,000 in 1983 to 4,500.

Also offering a form
of competition not welcomed by specialist dealers is the rack­ing industry.
Racking companies sell 50-title "racks" of prerecorded videos
(mostly feature films) to non-specialist outlets like gas stations,
drugstores, and newspaper shops. The Video Trade Association has condemned
the practice but, in a free mar­ket, is powerless to do more.

All this suggests that
today's popular image of film as a dying art is misleading. The viewing habit
has merely diversified into new outlets and delivery systems, with the
VCR-equipped den taking over from cinema as today's main venue for
movie-goggling. The indelible popcorn or ice-cream stains are more likely to
be on your own carpet, and you can neck in the back row of your living room.
David Docherty again: "We calculate that, in Britain, 8 percent of
prerecorded video is rented each week by each VCR owner, which adds up to 345
million rentals per annum. Multiply that by three – our esti­mate of the
average number of people watching each video – and you have a fig­ure of
1.035 billion, which is virtually the same as the number of moviegoers at the
height of the cinema's popularity 39 years ago. Add to that the number of
people who watch feature films on network TV – and many record them and watch
them more than once – and you're well up to 3 billion. By then you realize
how ridiculous it is to judge enthusiasm for movies in Britain today merely
by the figure – less than 2 percent of that total – who troop out to the
cinemas to see feature films."

Against this
background of domestic movie bliss, what chance does British Film Year have?
BFY is a frantic flag-waving effort to get people out of their homes and into
cinemas, thereby pouring fresh money into the ailing British exhibition
circuits and even into British filmmaking. "Cinema: the best place to
see a film," cries the BFY slogan, in the teeth of clear evidence that
most people think the oppo­site. In 1978, when a cross section of the British
population were quizzed by the research group MINTEL
on
cinemagoing frequency, 43 percent said they went
once a year or more often, 11 percent went less often, 44 percent went never.
By 1985 cine-zeal had dwindled still further: 34 percent once a year or more,
18 percent less often, 49 percent never.

Between 1978 and 1983,
the number of cinema seats in the country declined from 738,000 (spread over
985 sites and 1,519 screens) to 505,000 (707 sites and 1,293 screens). And
even 1978's figures seem sickly when viewed in the context of Brit­ish moviegoing history as a whole. In 1935, when the
Department of Trade began recording the number of cinemas operating in the
country each year, there were 4,448. This increased to 4,703 in 1945 and was
still steady in 1950 at 4,660.

To find a historical
parallel for today's meager tally of cinemas – around 1,200 – you have to go
all the way back to the beginning of the century. And even in 1910, when we
have the first unofficial cinema count in Britain, there were 1,600 movie theaters
in the country – 23 percent more than today.

The effect of all
these emptying Odeons, ABCs, and Alhambras has been to starve film production itself.
Between 1974 and 1984, the number of feature films registered as British-made
each year fell from 99 to 31. No wonder many indus­try lobbyists today are
desperate to intro­duce legislation or levy systems that will require the
goose that lays the golden eggs – the video market – not to keep them all to
herself but to roll a few in the direction of the film studios, the distribu­tion
chains, and production companies.

How you reeducate
people out of a new habit back into an old one is a vexed ques­tion. A
Broadcasting Research Unit survey on "The Best Way to Watch a Feature
Film" found that 31 percent said in the cinema and 64 percent said on
VCRs or TV (Five percent were "Don't knows:' those perplexing people who
presumably spend all day on their front doormats, keys in hand, wondering
whether to stay in or go out.) Divided into age groups, these statistics
break down into a predictably higher cinegoing
ratio among the young.) But even in the 16-29 age group, home viewing gets
the vote over going out to the local cinema, 57 percent to 39.

Why has video caught
on so much more in Britain than in other developed coun­tries? A 1984 survey
comparing VCR pene­tration among major industrial countries showed Britain in
the lead, five percentage points ahead of its nearest rival, Japan, and 13
points ahead of the third most video-oriented country, Norway. Paul Dezelsky, market analyst for Thorn-EMI, has no doubt that
Britain's uniquely extensive rental business is partly responsible: "If
you consider that there are 21 million households in Britain, virtually all
TV equipped, then the 8 million rented TV sets in use today constitute about
38 per­cent of the market. Of those 8 million households renting TVs, 2.6
million also rent VCRs. So rentals are a big slice of the market. They're
even more influential than these figures suggest, because many people begin
by renting and then buy. Of course, there's no real financial logic to
renting. But the rental habit has become ingrained in Britain, and its appeal
is un­doubtedly that it allows the customer that painless introduction to VCR
viewing. In the process it lubricates the sales market."

In every country,
video, cable, and TV all have the advantage over cinema that you don't have
to put on your hat and coat or order a babysitter
or
get the car out or risk being mugged outside the viewing venue of your
choice. But there's an advantage to video that isn't shared by cable or
network TV or satellite: the "flexible response" facility. A video
is like a book. You can choose not only when you read it but how you read it.
You can view it in bits or all at one go; you can linger over it or skim-view
it; you can go back or shoot forward; you can freeze shots; you can even fall
asleep over it, as you can over your bedtime Robert Ludlum or Jane Austen,
and when you wake up go back to where you tapped out and start again. You
have final cut.

At video's birth the
Jeremiahs prophe­sied that its appeal was so down-market it would never
outlive the initial joys it offered to porno or splatter fanciers. But video
has long since shaken off its For Creeps Only reputation. You can now watch
opera, ballet, Masterpiece Theatre,Wimbledon tennis, gardening cassettes, yoga
cassettes, how-to-look-after-your-dog and how-to-solve-the-Rubik's-Cube
cassettes. Dynasty and Miami Vice,too.

You can even watch
feature films. But if cinema wants to grab its customers back from this
super-versatile gewgaw, it must come up with a whole new bag of tricks itself
– or capitalize with renewed vigor on the old ones.

* The Broad­casting
Research Unit is an independent body housed in the British Film Institute and
funded by the BBC, the IBA
(Indepen­dent
Broadcasting Authority), and the Markle Foundation.